Study Illuminates 2012 Plans for BI and Tablets

In December, 2011 InformationWeek published a report called “Outlook 2012” (free to registered users). The report is based on an online survey of 605 business technology professionals (most in IT) in North America conducted in October, 2011. The purpose of the survey was to gauge IT spending, staffing plans, and strategies for 2012.

Overall, survey respondents expect technology spending to increase in 2012. Fifty-six percent of survey respondents said their companies planned to increase tech spending in the coming year, up from 46% two years ago. In contrast, just 16% of respondents think their companies will cut IT budgets in 2012. A couple of findings are particularly relevant to people involved in BI deployments:

• Business intelligence is a critical discipline. Almost 60% of respondents said their companies consider it important to do timely analysis of sales and operations data. And mining customer data emerged as one of the top 3 operational and strategic initiatives, trailing only keeping IT systems up and running and analyzing sales and operations. Fifty-four percent of respondents said mining customer data was important. (Interestingly, 21% said it was unimportant.)
• Tablets are becoming important business tools. Fifty one percent of IT pros in the older 2010 survey “strongly disagreed” that their companies would give tablets to even 10% of employees who normally would get a desktop or laptop computer. In the more recent 2011 survey, just 35% of respondents were that deeply skeptical. And 31% of respondents in the 2011 survey agreed that tablets will become the main device for select employees.

Likely implications for QlikView data wranglers and power analysts, as well as to the IT organizations that support QlikView deployments, (see related blog post, “Self-Service BI: Power to ALL the People”) are that demand for QlikView apps will increase in your organization in 2012, as will demand for support for these apps on mobile devices―particularly tablets.